House Targets Sea Level Rise Resiliency

• By Jim Turner
• March 1, 2022

TALLAHASSEE --- The Florida House is expected Wednesday to approve a proposal that would establish a new resiliency office directly under Gov. Ron DeSantis, after Democrats were unable to make changes to address the causes of rising seas.

The measure (HB 7053), which would build on a 2021 law, would require the development of a resilience action plan for the state highway system, require a prioritized list of resilience projects that would include costs and timelines and create a database that would identify such things as medical centers, utilities, emergency operations centers and airports that would be threatened by rising sea levels.

The House took up the bill Tuesday and positioned it for a vote.

“The bill is focused on what we can fix today, what we can fix tomorrow and what we can continue to fix each and every day,” bill sponsor Demi Busatta Cabrera, R-Coral Gables, said. “It's focused on real results and real actions to protect our communities from flooding and sea level rise.”

However, Democrats argued the measure should do more.

“There's sort of two sides to this problem,” Rep. Ben Diamond, D-St. Petersburg, said. “There's protecting our communities and making our communities more resilient to the issues of flooding and sea level rise. But then there's also stopping the causes of those problems in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and in terms of reducing our carbon emissions.”

The Republican-dominated House on Tuesday rejected a pair of amendments proposed by Diamond that would have required the resiliency office and the state's chief resiliency officer to investigate the causes of rising seas and to track the costs of resilience projects.

Busatta Cabrera contended that Diamond’s proposals wouldn't provide “real results” and would politicize the issue.

“Floridians don't care about us scoring political points,” Busatta Cabrera said. “They don't care about what words we use. They care about action. They care about real results.”

Diamond rejected the characterization of his effort as being political, noting he didn’t use the words “climate change,” a phrase mostly kept under wraps by state Republican leaders before the 2018 elections.

Days after being sworn into office in 2019, DeSantis issued an executive order that created the Office of Resilience and Coastal Protection in the Department of Environmental Protection.

Last year, lawmakers approved a measure that calls for spending up to $100 million a year on projects to address flooding and sea-level rise. A priority of House Speaker Chris Sprowls, R-Palm Harbor, the proposal also created a grant program for local governments.

A Senate bill (SB 1940) that is similar to Busatta Cabrera’s measure received unanimous support Monday from the Appropriations Committee and is ready to go to the full Senate.

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